There’s More to Life Than Discount Dentistry

When you graduated from dental school, it was probably with the idea that you’d have a satisfying and very profitable career. Hopefully, that’s worked out for you.

Your days at the practice present interesting and challenging cases for which you’re paid handsomely. You go home at the end of every work day knowing that you’ve made a serious difference in the lives of your patients.

What’s that? Your days in the office aren’t anything like that?

That’s not surprising.

To be honest, very few dentists’ lives are the picture of perfection described above. It’s more like they dread going into the office because they know they’re facing an unending string of routine exams, drill-and-fills, and argumentative patients who only want what insurance will cover. They’re getting beaten up by insurance company flunkies who know nothing about dentistry.

They’re getting loads of new patients, but not high-value patients. Dentists are working too hard for too long for too little.

If that’s you, it’s time to think seriously about making dentistry everything you always wanted it to be. It starts with a hard look at how you’re marketing your practice.

Be Careful What You Market For

Let’s keep this short: if you’re marketing on low price, specials, and insurance acceptance, you’re harvesting the bottom of the prospect barrel. Not that those patients don’t deserve quality dental care – individually, they’re just not worth that much to your practice.

That’s without mentioning that price-based practice marketing often degenerates into a price war with competitors. You can “win” by shaving your margins to the bone, but you’ll need a huge stream of new patients to make any money.

And you’ll be really, really tired.

Dr. James Kiehl of New Hampshire knows a thing or two about price marketing. He said, “Some of the advertising I’ve done in the past was more offer-driven, free exam, X-ray kinds of things. When you bring patients in that way, you’re chasing them with the next offer or they’re chasing you for the next offer, all the way down the line.

“With the Patient Attraction System, a lot of the new patients already are very knowledgeable about what they’re looking for. Just the other day, I had a patient come in specifically wanting to talk about implants and he had heard us talk about implants and was ready to move forward. That’s been nice to have them come in already pre-educated as to what we do here.

SmartBox works with more than 550 dentists on three continents to help them get better patients. Our industry-leading Patient Attraction System® provides a steady stream of better patients so our doctors can focus on doing the dentistry… but for patients who represent much higher lifetime value for the practice.